Personal Essays: "The Heir to the Boy Who Cried Wolf"

[Note: To better utilize this blog as both an archive for my writing, and as a quasi-portfolio, I'll be posting a few old essays of mine. Some of them are personal, some of them are dated opinions-- snapshots of time. I hope you enjoy reading them.]

                How and why we perceive the world the way we do, and why we stop seeing things the way they are, and how we try to get a grasp of how we remember our past, is something that I’ve thought about since the day that I realized that I wasn’t remembering what I did a year ago, and then a month ago, and then an hour earlier. Memory, the concept of time, perception of reality, and our attention to detail, are all things that we have to both develop and become accustomed to as we grow during childhood. The child’s mind perceives so much, and remembers so much, yet its plasticity lets reality bend just enough for amusement and tolerance of both the harshness and the mundanity of reality. As we grow older, our minds change, from the perception of time, to what we deem as acceptable and real. But when something comes into our lives that questions this reality, how do we react to that alien thing that is so real, yet beyond what we’ve come to accept so far? How do we document this phenomenon? We may hypothesize and deliberate upon the whats and whys, but we just don’t know enough about both ourselves and what exists within the universe that that’s all we can do, like a child feeling their way through the dark.

Personal Essays: "The Last Week"

[Note: To better utilize this blog as both an archive for my writing, and as a quasi-portfolio, I'll be posting a few old essays of mine. Some of them are personal, some of them are dated opinions-- snapshots of time. I hope you enjoy reading them.]

                Even though I have three siblings, I grew up as an only child. Out of my three siblings, I’ve only ever really interacted with two of them. Out of those two, there was only one that ever really put any effort to be personally involved in my life, and that was my late sister Eleanor.

                She was the oldest of the three, so I suppose it was partly through some sense of responsibility and maturity that she chose to be at least mildly involved with my life. Seeing as how they were all half-siblings, I can sort of understand why they took such a stand-off-ish stance in dealing with us. They all despised our father, and only Eleanor chose to get close to my mother.

                It’s difficult to discuss my siblings with too much detail, or even to describe particular moments with them in the past, as they always treated me in such an alien way, yet I was expected to call them brother and sister, and to say “our mom,” and “our dad.”